Digital asset management (DAM) includes the ingesting, annotating, cataloguing, storing and retrieving of digital assets, such as digital photographs, animations, videos and music. Examples of derivatives from digital assets include, but are not limited to, images which are copies, at a lower resolution, of the master digital image. Digital asset management systems are computer software and/or hardware systems that aid in the process of digital asset management. In this context, the term “ingesting” refers to putting digital assets into an archive. To put data into an archive (“to ingest it”), the correct data needs to be identified and the target location for the data movement needs to be identified. An ingestion engine is a piece of software that, at a minimum, provides:                a mechanism for selecting and moving data;        a means for validating data contents;        a method for confirming that writes have occurred correctly and completely;        a means for un-ingesting data when required.        
In existing DAM systems, the owner of the digital asset stores the master file, together with the derivatives from that master file, in one location. That location is either local (ie, on the premises of the data owner) or remote (eg, at an externally hosted data centre).